Eighty Years Ago This Week

  The trial for treason of John Amery took place and lasted a mere eight minutes. He was the son of senior Conservative politician Leo Amery but had gone from being the black sheep of the family to defecting to Nazi Germany where he recruited for the SS British unit and made propaganda broadcasts. He had been arrested in Italy by British troops including Alan Whicker, later famous as a journalist. Attempts to present him as mentally ill and unfit to plead or as a Spanish citizen had failed. Amery pled guilty, which was tantamount to suicide as the only penalty for the offence was death. He was duly sentenced to be hanged. Yugoslavia was declared a republic by the communist dominated Constituent Assembly. The monarchy was abolished permanently. The now ex-king protested feebly but the British government, which had been the chief backer of Tito's partisan movement during the Axis occupation and de facto civil war,   accepted the assembly's decision with only the faintest qualif...

  Three officers - a major general and two colonels - who had  defected from the British led Indian army to the Japanese controlled Indian National Army were put on trial by court martial at the Red Fort in Calcutta on charges equivalent to treason. All came from the Punjab but one was Muslim, one Sikh and the third Hindu. They all chose to be defended by the Indian National Congress. The trial provoked extensive protests in which hundreds were injured.   Two police manned coast guard stations in Palestine were blown up  in protest at British measures to halt illegal Jewish immigation causing some injuries. The British responded with an attack on kibbutzim suspected of harbouring the attackers. Some 10,000 soldiers of the 6th Airborne Division conducted the operation in which eight settlers were killed and dozens injured. The settlements were searched and some forty Jews were taken away for interrogation. British led forces including Gurkhas were heavily engag...

  Britain was facing the challenge of its effective bankruptcy. The lead British negotiator Lord Keynes was on the verge of collapse after navigating aggressive American nit-picking and confused views in London; the Chancellor of the Exchequer Hugh Dalton was at sea, barely reading the papers which he might not have understood anyway; the Bank of England showed little signs of awareness that Britain's financial might had dwindled since 1914. Three weeks of gruelling negotiations in Washington yielded a public offer from the US of a loan of £875m at 2% interest and £125m applied against lease-lend debts. The stark truth was that unless Britain were prepared to retreat into complete autarky based on the relics of Empire ("starvation corner") it held no cards. The near-truce between the Labour government and the Conservatives was breaking down. The government had yet to roll out its full detailed five year plan for nationalising industry including utilities, in particular ho...

  A specially modified Gloster Meteor  set a new official world speed record of 606mph. There seemed a fitting symmetry in the maker of the RAF's last biplane fighter scoring this triumph with the RAF's first operational  jet fighter. The achievement appeared to be a continuation of the way progress in aviation had been measured by such records. It seemed to hold promise for the vast aircraft industry which Britain had built during the war. In reality the commercial battle would be won by size of accessible market and of military purchasing power; the US aviation industry was always going to win. Anyway the German rocket powered Me 163 fighter had already flown faster, making the RAF record doubly irrelevant. Tito reaped the rewards of his military success in the fight against German occupation and the virtual civil war to which unwavering British support had made a large contribution. His People's Front won 90% of the vote in Yugoslavia's parliamentary elections. It wa...